


fires i would like to know

by dollsome



Category: Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 12:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollsome/pseuds/dollsome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Jane Eyre had found another source of fascination at Thornfield Hall?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. do you never laugh?

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this when I was doing my undergrad thesis on Jane Eyre a few years ago because it was literally the only way I could find any catharsis for Mr. Rochester's patriarchal NONSENSE. That guy and I have a very complicated relationship. :)
> 
> This is posted elsewhere on the interwebs as an original piece of fiction by original-work-author!me -- I think I hoped that it might become a success along the lines of, I dunno, _Mr. Darcy, Vampyre_? -- but let's be real here, it's totally Jane/Bertha fanfiction, and this is where it really belongs. Oh, wondrous AO3!

_I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.  
_ (Mr. Rochester, _Jane Eyre_ , Chapter XIV)

_“You have a very bad disposition,” said she, “and one to this day I feel it impossible to understand: how for nine years you could be patient and quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and violence, I can never comprehend.”  
_ (Aunt Reed, _Jane Eyre_ , Chapter XXI)

_I am inhabited by a cry.  
_ _Nightly it flaps out  
_ _Looking, with its hooks, for something to love._  
(Sylvia Plath, 'Elm')

 

I.

 

“Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre?” he asks me. He does not wait for my answer. He tells me, like a regular Bluebeard, never to visit the third floor.

I nod my assent, making the corners of his mouth curl. Privately, I decide that I am his servant, not his wife, and will explore where I like.

 

+ 

 

I hover outside the door in my few free moments, like Romeo throwing stones at windows from beneath the balcony. I hear rustles and thuds and (here is my favourite bit) laughter. A woman’s voice, but somehow not a woman’s laugh: it is miles away from that empty drawing room titter that makes one think of fans and ringlets.

‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’

I count the exclamation points. I grow more and more curious. On one or two occasions, Grace Poole slips out; she does so with excellent efficiency, and I can never quite catch a glimpse of anything besides firelight in the sliver of open door. Maybe once, a fleck of shadow. Grace Poole has sullen, sunken eyes (I am not pretty but I thank God my eyes don’t look like hers) and her heavy glances fall on me like admonishments every time she catches me at it. I ignore them.

Mrs. Fairfax claims (when I ask) that it’s Grace Poole who does the laughing, but that woman’s never smiled a day in her life, let alone laughed. I’m not an utter fool.

 

+

 

Adele twirls and twirls in her pretty pink skirts. Her blonde curls bounce. I would like to tell her that when I was her age, I was stood in a line and had my hair hacked off. I amuse myself by imagining the perfect wrinkle of her nose, should she be served the foul mush we Lowood girls called breakfast. I tell her every fairy story I know, and make the goblins hideous enough to curl anyone’s toes in fright. She is all giggles and shrieks.

 

+

 

‘I think you must be too young to understand love’s keen sting, little Jane,’ my master says, apropos (as usual) of nothing. He likes to have me sit beside him before the fire once supper is through. The flames and I amuse him. Firelight and shadow add a certain something to his ugly face.

‘I think so, sir,’ I demurely oblige. I can tell this is the answer that he wants. He is quite easy for me to read. He watches me, waiting for the addendum he knows will come. He likes my slyness when I frost it in innocuous servants’ tones. It tickles his fancy to have me here, eighteen and miserably plain and poor but – a surprise! – _so bright_. Almost a worthy opponent.

Tonight, I’ll play along. ‘And you, sir?’

One day I will drown him in sirs. If I were him, I’d have tired of it already, but he likes it.

‘Oh, Jane.’ He reclines back into the dark. I look at his feet. Then at the dog, who (just between us) I like better. And think rather handsomer. He licks his paws. ‘Even a girl with as sound a mind as yours could never endure the stories of what I’ve known of love.’ A bitter laugh. He draws it out. I suspect he likes the sound of it in his own ears. ‘If one could call it love. In truth, alas, I have always been more prone to hungrier, wickeder things, things that come to haunt and ruin in time – but certainly such tales aren’t for your ears, my fairy child. Tilt your head to the left, will you? Yes, like that. Oh, Janet. Eyes like those – you must be some _belle dame_ , some enchantress. One morning I will wake and you’ll have left us, back to your elfin grot and your harem of doomed princes. I swear – no, don’t move! Not just yet – that with those eyes you look right clean into my soul.’ A shudder. He’d make Hamlet cringe. ‘How it weighs heavy on my heart, to think what vile things you must behold there.’

‘I am hardly beautiful, sir,’ I reply, ‘and to my knowledge, cannot see into souls.’

And have no need to look into yours, I do not add. It is all perfectly plain on your face.

 

+

 

At night I hear fingernails skim across my door outside. Back and forth, back and forth. I hear steps, too. And breathing.

I stay tucked in bed, blankets to my chin. I wonder what would happen if I flung the door open wide and invited in my midnight stranger. We could play, perhaps, at St. Agnes’ Eve (though I make it a habit never to go to bed hungry, having already done so more times than I’d have chosen in my life). Do you play Porphyro at the keyhole, my stranger? And how far does the game go? Might you watch me undress? Sneak your way into my bed? It is an interesting notion.

Of course, Madeline thought it was all only dreaming.

I pride myself upon being a bit more discerning.

Back and forth, back and forth go your mystery fingertips.


	2. 'but this isn't a love story!' she protests

II.

His bedcurtains catch fire.

I smell the smoke, and put it out with basin water. The rescue leaves him drenched. He is sopping and sorry-looking, looming over me. Gratitude sits strangely on him.

‘My angel,’ he teases me, terribly serious, meaning it. He grasps one of my shoulders. Even under his big hands I cannot feel precisely small.

‘What caused the fire?’ I ask. I glance out into the dark quiet corridor.

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘A candle I’d forgotten to blow out.’

 

+

 

I dream of waves. They lap the shore with the grace of eager tongues. They pulse and whisper, turning my thoughts to silk, to drumbeats. I am bigger than my body, and feel like water. I have no interest in quelling fires. Behind me stand the ruins of the big old house. Beyond there is nothing save the rhythm and the blue, a perfect angry eternity of sea. It rains without wetness. The wind whips my expectant skin. It sounds like a song. Like a wild wild laugh. The moon is so bright.

 

+

 

In the daytime, I attack poor Adele with a volume of Donne. She gets bored in five minutes and wanders off to practice pirouettes. 

I contemplate the pages myself, knowing she will like it too much if I watch her dance. I mean to teach her a bit of English restraint if such a feat is possible. My goals, I know, are lofty.

_Mark,_ Mr. Donne orders, _but this flea, and mark in this,_

_How little that which thou deniest me is;_

_It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,_

_And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be;_

_Thou know’st that this cannot be said_

_A sin, nor shame nor loss of maidenhead_

How like a man.

 

+

 

‘Would you miss me, Janet, if I were to vanish?’ His question, of course. I am perched on the stool at his feet. One of his toes pokes my hip. I can tell the rest of him would like to follow suit, clamber up onto and over the rest of me. ‘If you woke one morning and I was not there – dare I to imagine you might weep? One errant tear, at least, for your absent master.’

‘There doesn’t seem much sense in crying one tear,’ I respond, my posture very straight. I’ve spent hours watching Adele parade the nursery with a book on her head. Perhaps watching alone has helped me to absorb her poise. ‘It seems more practical to weep a great deal or not at all.’

‘Nymph,’ he says, the accusation fond. ‘Bewitching thing.’

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ I reply. My back is hot from the fire. ‘I am only Jane Eyre.’

The next morning, he has gone away. Off to visit some people who are as important as he is.

‘Poor man,’ Mrs. Fairfax says, looking out the window as if she might catch a glimpse of him on the horizon. She is rather an old romantic, I think. ‘He never can quite bear to stay in one place for long. This house, especially.’

‘What a pity,’ I say.

 

+

 

He comes back with a tall dark beauty of a woman. She is called Blanche Ingram. She regards me more kindly than the dog, but only because I don’t try to lick her. Her mother comes, too, and a number of gentlemen. My master has me sit among them, homely and silent as they laugh and talk of people I don’t know or care to. He does not speak to me, but his eyes return to me time and time again. What an odd man he is. He enjoys showing me off, his ugly little prize. I keep to the corners. I sit straight-backed, and do not talk to anyone (fitting, I think, since no one tries to talk to me), and in my boredom drag my fingernails back and forth over the wall’s paneling. I pound out small rhythms.

Adele wishes to dance for the party; he will not let her, and she runs out in a flurry of tears. I rise.

‘Don’t follow her, Jane,’ he orders. Blanche’s mother looks at me in surprise, as if she’s only just noticed me. ‘Let the lovely little fool cry herself to sleep. She could use a lesson or two of the kind.’

‘I must go, sir,’ I say. ‘It is my duty.’

‘I demand that you stay.’

‘But alas, sir,’ I reply, as I walk out, ‘I am not _your_ governess.’

 

+

 

Tired of my usual arsenal of fairytales, I try something new that night. I tell the story of Boccaccio’s Isabella and her pot of basil. Perhaps I rather relish the telling of the decapitation. I invent a detail or two of my own. She traces dead Lorenzo’s throat with her fingers, memorizing the skin, before she hacks it open.

Adele thinks it horrible. ‘But this isn’t a love story!’ she protests in her birdlike French. ‘He’s dead and she’s crazy!’

‘It would take a great deal of love indeed to make someone carry around a pot with a rotten head in it,’ I counter. ‘More love than the prince felt for his Cinderella, I suspect. It is terribly easy to love someone because they look beautiful dancing with you under the stars.’

‘You are so strange,’ Adele declares, crossing her arms with a pout. ‘Tell me Beauty and the Beast instead.’

I do. The beast stays a beast at the end, for Beauty likes him that way.

‘You’ve told it all wrong! How is he to kiss her with his teeth so sharp?’

‘That’s why it’s a fairytale,’ I answer. ‘In my experience, clever ladies seldom love beasts for being beasts.’

 

+

 

My master and his guests get quite drunk and jolly one evening, and decide some theatrics are in order. A makeshift stage is erected; a treasure trove of costumes appears as if by magic. Blanche drapes herself in white and calls herself a Greek goddess. Aphrodite, unsurprisingly, but I believe I may catch a glimpse or two of Artemis around her edges. Her dark hair is piled in a glorious mess on her head; as she glides around the room, her curls brush her bare shoulders. A goddess’s skin ought to be gold, but hers is a fair, flawless white. Everything about her begs to be unwrapped and touched. I make sure not to look at her for long.

Laughing, she tosses a red and gold shawl over my master’s head and deems him a gypsy woman. He is happy to become a hunched old crone, and the laughter of his friends only eggs him on. I wish I were upstairs. There’s not much to enjoy about standing on the outskirts of their merry metamorphoses.

I play Daphne when he finds his way to my ignored corner by the fire.

‘Give me your hand, child,’ he creaks, the stupid Apollo, ‘so that I might tell your fortune.’

I keep my hands clasped.

Impatient, he snakes his fingers down my arm, shackles my wrist with them and then guides my palm up close to his mouth.

I draw in close. He is surprised and pleased by that.

‘You have my hand,’ I tell him.

‘I’ve half a mind to keep it.’ His voice is his again, and very low. He breathes his liquor-sour breath onto me. ‘What would you do? If I weren’t to let go of your hand?’

‘What any smart animal might,’ I return. ‘Gnaw it off and leave it behind.’

He considers me. The colours in the scarf dance in the firelight, like living things that might devour his head. ‘A fine actress you are, Janet.’

‘Am I, sir?’

‘You pretend so very well not to like me.’

‘A necessary counter to Miss Ingram, then, who pretends so very well to.’

‘I don’t give a damn about Miss Ingram.’

‘I suspect she’ll be very disappointed to hear that, sir.’

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. I do mean to marry her. I cannot imagine a more perfect wife.’

‘Nor can I.’ I cast a glance at her. She stands between two gentlemen. She throws her head back and laughs. Her curls shake. Her teeth are sharp pearls.

‘How would you feel, Jane? If Thornfield were to have a new mistress?’

‘What I feel does not matter, sir.’

‘It does to me.’

‘Why?’

He tightens his grip on my wrist. Perhaps he thought I was just being clever; that I would not chew it off, given the right motivation.

‘Why?’ I say again, quite plainly. I do not use the low lovers’ tones that he does.

Anger flashes over his crude face. He casts my hand away.

‘Insolent girl,’ he declares. He stalks back to Blanche, who regards him with a big lovely smile.

 

+

 

The party is joined by a man called Richard Mason; he is a small, sad-faced man, and gives off the impression of being grey all over even though his hair is wheat-blonde. His coming is rather a mystery, and my master works hard to keep it that way. He would like to intrigue me, I suspect. He has not spoken to me in days.

 

+

 

I cannot sleep, so I open the window and consider the night sky. The moon is bright and full. It turns my mind to Blanche Ingram; I think on wanton goddesses. I would like to bathe in moonlight.

Then, from above me, there is a clatter. A cry – a cry in a voice that I know. It almost becomes a word.

Then my master’s name is shouted out by a different voice, a man’s. Again and again and again he calls, like the yelps of a kicked pup.

 

+

 

My master requires my services. Funny, that we are friends again, but I oblige him. He takes me up to the third floor, into the room I have lingered before so many times. It is sparse, unexceptional. There is nothing on the wall. There are a few chairs and Mason sits and moans in one of them. His shirt is open and soaked with blood.

‘Mason, you damned fool,’ my master says, inspecting the damage.

‘I couldn’t not see her,’ Mason answers in a brittle wheeze. His eyes are heavy, and keep closing. His blood has turned the floorboards black. ‘I couldn’t. I know she is beyond hope, Edward, but you can’t imagine how it plagues me. Day after day. It’s been months since I’ve slept the night through. To think of her here like this—’

‘Yes, well, I’d say you’ve learned your lesson, haven’t you? She is a fine teacher.’

I stand behind him, silent, drinking everything in.

‘You tried to touch her, then, Richard?’ my master surmises. His tone is mean; perhaps he is mocking him.

In a pitiful whine, Mason pants, ‘I—I couldn’t help it. How could I have known about the knife?’ His eyes shut, and his head lulls onto his shoulder. My master prods him in the cheek.

‘And I did not expect it,’ Mason murmurs. His eyes are still closed. He sounds almost dreamy. ‘She looked so quiet at first.’

Something in my heart stirs, like a newly-woken animal might unfurl and stand up on its feet. My master laughs harshly. ‘I warned you,’ he says.

 

+

 

I play nursemaid to poor Mr. Mason while my master rides out to fetch the doctor from town. He fades in and out of sleep, and moans, and flinches at the touch of my fingers. I keep at my work in spite of that, dabbing the wound on his chest with a wet bloodied cloth. I feel every inch of me. The air seems to sing, is alive with the threat to catch fire. There is a door at the back of the room. Grace Poole is inside, I know, but Grace Poole does not smile or laugh or bite, does not do anything besides drink and play gaoler to—

I think I know now what Adele feels when she wants to dance and is forbidden it. My feet threaten to cross the room of their own accord. My hands itch and twitch for the doorknob. But I remain by Mason’s side, tending to his wounds like I was told to. There are spots of his blood on my nightdress.

‘Bertha,’ he breathes.  

‘My name is Jane Eyre,’ I tell him, sure to sound kind.

He opens his eyes and blinks, staring up into my face.

‘Yes,’ he says, his words loose and fumbling. ‘You don’t look like her at all. It’s only that you’re wearing white.’

I hold my breath. My heart might stop. ‘Who is she?’

‘My sister.’ He pauses to cough. ‘I worry. I know she is mad, that she can’t be helped, but I can never shake the thought of her … trapped here, ten years now, doomed to this house …’

‘Ten years?’ I say, trying to understand, to imagine. I was locked in a bedroom once for one night. Even now when I think on it, it makes me sick.

‘I’ll leave in the morning. He won’t want me here, not after—I must go.’

‘But—’

‘God, I’d take her away with me if I could. But I’m nothing to her now. I don’t think she even remembers me. And yet—for the first second, when I stepped in, I could have sworn—the way she looked at me—’ I think at first that the sound is a cough, but it is a laugh: a watery, pathetic thing. The saddest sound I’ve heard. ‘What am I saying? I’d have done it, if I were her. I’d have cut my heart out. Bitten down hard and sucked out the blood.’

I pause in wiping his wound clean. My hand rests over his heart. Its beat is a distant drum, thrumming into my fingertips.

‘Bertha,’ he whimpers again. And then he says my name. ‘Jane. Jane Eyre. Will you make me a promise?’

I do. 

 

+

 

Mason leaves early in the morning.

While my master is out bidding him farewell, I strike a deal with Grace Poole.


	3. flecks of beauty in her voice

III.

My cousin John Reed shoots himself. He threw a book at my forehead once and made me bleed. They locked me up in the room where my uncle died, as if I were the bad little beast who needed caging. I shed no tears over John.

Still, I go back to my aunt at Gateshead, as a dutiful niece might. My cousins Eliza and Georgiana are all sobs and snot in spite of usually being so pretty. My aunt is on her deathbed, quite ruined by all the disgrace. ‘Why, you are like – you are like Jane Eyre!’ she cries after the first few moments, in which she could not recognize me at all. She jabbers, delirious. I watch her die and do not feel much.

When I go back to Thornfield, my master tells me he is to marry Blanche Ingram. I give him my congratulations. I do not sleep that night.

 

+

 

Instead, I climb the stairs in my bare feet. The stone is deliciously cold. When I reach the door, I rap my knuckles against it three times.

Grace Poole’s wary face is there to greet me.

‘If the master should find out—’ she begins, doubtful still.

‘One third of my wages, Grace,’ I remind her. I am surprised to hear myself sounding rather as a mistress might speaking to her servant.

This is enough to assuage her doubts, in any case. ‘Stay on the opposite side of the room. She’s faster than you’d think.’

The corner of my mouth twitches. ‘So am I.’

‘I’ll be right out here,’ she concludes, ‘should you need me, Miss Eyre.’

I can tell she is baffled by my madwoman’s mission. Fortunately, she knows better than to stop me, being rather the expert on madwomen.

 

+

 

Perhaps unwisely, I close the door behind me when I go into the second room. It is dark, not even a candle lit. There is one window, small and too high up to reach. Moonlight pours through it. The room has a bed and a chair, and a vanity with a cracked mirror. The mirror strikes me as foolish; I think of all the things that could be done with a shard of glass.

She is on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. At the sound of the door shutting, she turns. I take a few steps nearer, until I can make her out in the moonlit dark. She is big – not fat, but thick-limbed, and I can tell she must be far taller than me. As tall, perhaps, as my master is. Her hair is a dark, wild thicket of snarls. It drapes over her face, covering her eyes. I can see her chin and her mouth. She has very full lips. Just as her brother said, she is dressed in white. The nightgown slides down on one side; her right shoulder is bare, and so is the curve of her breast.

‘At last we meet,’ I say. ‘You’ve been my midnight visitor, yes? The one outside my door?’

She says nothing, looking at me from beneath the mess of her dark hair.

‘Bertha,’ I continue. It feels funnily like addressing a new pupil. ‘Bertha Mason. My name is Jane Eyre.’

There! That voice. She mumbles it, sloppily, after me: _‘Jane.’_

‘So you can speak,’ I surmise, keeping my voice light and brisk. ‘I wasn’t sure. I’d only heard you laugh. I thought you must be able to, though. I got the sense, from what your brother said, that you haven’t always been mad.

‘I promised your brother that I would keep you company when I could. He worries about you here. He is quite heartsick over the thought of you.’

‘Ha!’ She sits up. My heart jumps. Still, I am not precisely frightened of her.

‘That laugh,’ I say, ‘I feel as if it and I are friends already. How strange it is to see it come from your mouth. To match the noise to the face.’

She stands. Indeed, she is tall, but she stands hunched over. She draws near to me. She has a peculiar way of moving, as though she’s spent years trying to cave in on herself, to shrink until she vanishes altogether.

She does not stop until she is inches away. She looks down at me. One of her hands clings worriedly to her other arm. Her breath is hot on my face. ‘Are you mad, Jane Eyre?’

It is unexpectedly lovely, this sentence. I realize now that I’ve always heard flecks of beauty in her voice, and that was the thing that intrigued me so. She speaks in a way that is low and rich and full.

‘Not to my knowledge,’ I answer her.

She pushes her hair out of her eyes. They are smart and sharp, her eyes. At odds with her lunatic’s body.

‘Ah,’ she says. As she examines me, she smiles. She has a big smile. Her teeth must have yellowed, but I can’t tell in the dark – only that they are nicely shaped. She looks me up and down, from the top of my head to my bare toes, but never reaches out. I wonder whether she might be afraid to touch me. I stand straight as a lady in a ballroom, letting her look.

 

+

 

‘You look tired, Jane,’ my master remarks the next morning. We are out walking the grounds. Adele bounds ahead, chasing butterflies.

‘I did not sleep much, sir.’

‘Didn’t you?’ He seems quite satisfied with this, and I realize it is because he imagines my heart is broken. For of course, he means to marry Miss Ingram. I wonder whether he will shut her up in the attic, too, if she turns out not to be to his liking. ‘Bad dreams?’

‘No. I could not seem to turn off my brain, sir. That’s all.’

‘Ah.’ He stops. I do as well.

Adele is too hasty in her pursuit. She trips over her skirts and falls. I move forward to comfort her. He catches my arm with his big hard fingers. My veins start and stand at his touch. My pulse is a war drum.

‘Leave the child,’ he implores in low tones meant just for me. ‘She can rise on her own.’

‘Forgive me, sir,’ I reply, ‘but I do not think that leaving the child is what you pay me for.’

‘How hard you work, Jane.’

‘I do hope so, sir.’

‘Is it because you mean to please me?’

‘It is because,’ I say, casting a glance at the dismayed little darling (still sprawled on the grass looking baffled by her own sudden misfortune), ‘she requires a great deal of hard work.’

‘You think her rotten?’

‘I think her over-indulged, sir.’

‘Do you take issue with indulgence, Miss Eyre? Or perhaps fear it?’

‘I do not fear much.’

He stands between the child and me. I know better than to cross him; he will work himself into some madness over it, the great wretch. I imagine him into Cerberus, fidgeting and barking, hot breath and slobber.

‘I would like to be married, Jane,’ he tells me.

‘How nice for Miss Ingram, sir.’

‘I would like to be married, Jane,’ he says again. ‘I would like a wife to sit at my feet beneath my chair at night. To warm my bed. What do you think of that?’

‘I do not see what that has to do with me, sir.’

‘Don’t you?’

I do not give him yes or no. He stares at me; it is rather a good dare, this look, but hardly a capable seducer. I stare back. I lift my eyebrows.

‘How small and strange you are, Jane Eyre,’ he concludes at last. ‘I think sometimes that there is no soul in you. That you are some clockwork creature that moves as it ought to but has no heartbeat. No feeling. I think your bare skin must be ice. I think it might kill a man to touch you. I knew another with that power. But she, she was all fire. Tinder and sparks. Why, she nearly made ash of me. But I should not speak of that. Even you, placid little Janet – even you could not endure those tales. Even your mask of a face would surely crack. And yet what else could shake you?’

My gaze drifts, inadvertent, to the third floor window. He is caught up in his monologue and does not notice.

‘How I would like to trap you in some lucky net,’ he muses, ‘to keep you in a cage and study you. Make you sing.’ His mouth twitches. He has full lips like a harlot’s. ‘Would you sing for me, Janet?’

‘I am no bird,’ I say to him. ‘No net ensnares me.’

‘Not yet,’ he concedes after awhile.

Adele weeps over grass stains, quite inconsolable.

 

+

 

When I was eight, my cousin John Reed tried to kiss me. He called me names and tugged my hair. He listed out my various offenses to the universe: I was plain, I was small, I was ugly, there was no one in the world who cared for me. He was a cruel boy but by no means an original one. Still, I was young and wanted so badly to be loved. If a dark stranger had given me some ungodly spell to raise my parents from their graves I would have done it in a second with no thought for my soul. (‘Do you know what you must do to avoid hell, young Jane?’ Headmaster Brocklehurst asked me once; ‘I must stay in good health, and not die,’ I told him decisively.) I hated John and Georgiana and Eliza, and Aunt Reed most of all, but I felt starved by them all the same. I wanted their love, if only so I could fling it back in their faces.

On that occasion John shouted me into a corner, spittle flying from his rosebud mouth, so much like a porcelain doll’s. (He was a handsome child, as the worst ones often are.) I remember the wall hard against my back. He put his hands on either side of my neck, trapping me to the bleak fate that was staring into his dumb blue eyes, and he leaned forward. I squirmed and wiggled my way out of his grip. I bit his arm in the process. As he swore and blinked back tears, the baby, I ran to the other side of the room, near the door.

‘What a stupid whore you are,’ he spat. I imagine he thought he was being quite shocking. It was the first time I heard the word, at any rate. ‘No man shall ever want you for his wife.’

‘Good!’ I shouted back, all spice and fire. ‘For I shall never want one.’

I have not yet found a man who has tempted me to change my stance.

 

+

 

I dream that my great bed is full of ghosts. On my right side is Helen Burns. Her red hair tickles my cheek. ‘Little lamb, who made thee?’ she asks me, plaintive and lovely, her voice still a song. ‘Dost thou know who made thee?’ I turn to my left to find John Reed lying there. He is dead, dead, dead. A smear of blood blights his rosebud mouth. If I licked it off, I think it would taste sweet.

My master stands before us all.

‘Don’t you see?’ I say to him. ‘My bed is full. There is no room for you.’

‘Make room,’ he requests, loosening his cravat. He is almost handsome in the night. ‘Bend the heavens. Kill the stars. Only melt for me. My love, my love.’

I find I am trapped. The bed as hard as a wall against my back.

‘It is your time now, little tyrant,’ he whispers, climbing in uninvited. ‘But it will be mine presently. And once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I’ll attach you to a watch chain – yes, bonny wee thing, I’ll wear you in my bosom, lest my jewel I should tyne—’

‘On what wings dare he aspire,’ chants serene Helen. ‘What the hand dare seize the fire.’

His hand charges up my thigh. I wiggle and squirm. His fingertips soften and begin to dance.

No longer his.

‘And what shoulder, and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart, and when thy heart began to beat, what dread hand and what dread feet—’

There are kisses on my neck. They shock more than bites; like waves, like laughter. _Ha! Ha! Ha!_ How soft and boundless this big bed, how like a world, how many eternities I could stay here, she is all states and all princes I.

‘Oh,’ I breathe, ‘oh,’ all flesh and no clockwork. Back and forth back and forth go your mystery fingertips.

When I wake I am not alone, either. The sky is pearly with new morning.

‘I dreamt of you,’ I say.

 

+

 

The next evening, I am walking in the garden with my master when it begins to rain. I take it as a sign and begin to weep as convincingly as I can. He starts, pleased. He had been in the middle of discussing Miss Ingram.

‘Do you think I am an automaton?’ I demand. ‘A machine without feelings?’

For once, he has nothing to say. He looks at me. He waits for what I might say next.

‘I have as much soul as you,’ I say, ‘and full as much heart.’

When he pulls me into his arms I yield, a little clumsily. The dirt turns to mud around our feet. When he kisses me I keep my lips closed. He likes that, I think. In his arms I am any quivering lily-white virgin who has not yet been taught desire.

‘Call me Edward! Edward, my sweet Jane!’ he says, rhapsodic. The wind drowns him out.

 

+

 

‘I thought you said that clever ladies do not love beasts,’ Adele says, wrinkling her nose.

Perhaps there is some hope for her after all, buried as it is in ruffles and curtseys and bits of Parisian fluff.

 

+

 

‘And then, on the very day we are married—’

‘The truth will out.’

‘Due to Mason, perhaps. I rather think your dear brother would do anything for you.’

‘He should, at this point.’

‘Then that’s settled. I shall write to him, before the day. Oh! Imagine the scene. Let him burst in through the church doors.’

‘You in your wedding dress. Such a sweet virgin bride.’

(My cheeks redden.) ‘The vows just spoken.’

‘And your new husband—’

‘Your husband.’

‘— _our_ husband will have no choice but to show you. The ghastly truth.’

‘And there you will be.’

‘Hideous! The worst of curses. Of course, I must … must …’

‘Run back and forth like a beast.’

‘On all fours!’

‘Wrestle him to the ground with you.’

‘And you, watching with one hand to your mouth, just like this. Stunned that so good, so noble a man could betray you!’

‘Unable, of course, to be with him now. Wife or not.’

‘He will plead, you know. Make promises. Beg to whisk you away. Out from under the eyes of God. He is not above being cruel. He will remind you that you have no one. No one to judge you, should you give yourself to him. No one to come and claim you.’

‘And I will tell him,’ I say, ‘that I have myself, and that is enough.’

She stares at me a long while.

‘I don’t think he will recover from you,’ she says at last, ‘as he has recovered from me.’

‘Good.’

We look at one another. Then one of us begins to laugh. I cannot pinpoint who. Soon, we are in hysterics.

There is a disapproving rap on the door.

‘Miss Eyre,’ Grace Poole says, leaning in and eyeing us with the vague distrust all spinsters hold for giddy schoolgirls, ‘the master will be asking for you soon.’

I straighten my hair and my skirts, and stand.

‘Oh, do let me burn him in his bed,’ Bertha whispers, following after me, resting her chin on my shoulder, her breath in my ear, ‘and leave you the master of Thornfield, and all his treasures yours. Even those he has thrown out.’

‘Hush now,’ I order, smiling a bit. ‘We must be patient.’

Her impatience simmers in the air around us. He was right in that. She is a fire.

I turn to kiss her forehead, chaste and proper as any governess to her pupil. The comparison is not a perfect one. She has taught me plenty of things too, and will teach me plenty more.

‘Forgive me for being so bold, Miss,’ Grace Poole says after we have left her, tones making clear that she does not care a whit for my forgiveness, ‘but I don’t know what you’re playing at. The creature’s not to be trusted. Mad as anything.’

‘Really?’ I say. ‘I find her remarkably sane. Considering her circumstances.’

‘She’s caused the master a great deal of pain these many years, with that bad blood of hers. Madness in the family, you know. You can’t wash out that kind of taint.’

‘I like to think we are more than the sum of our origins.’

She clearly does not. ‘Be that as it may—’

‘I’d be careful if I were you, Miss Poole,’ I interrupt. ‘We are just servants now, of course, but soon I will be your mistress. I wouldn’t want things to grow awkward between us. After all, the job you perform is such a very important one. It would be so tiring to search for another servant with your prowess. Tiring, but not impossible.’

That silences her nicely.

I step from the room into the corridor and shut the door carefully behind me. There is the mean _click_ of the lock. The air is cooler out here, and stale without the spice of her smell. I lick my lips, and (though it is just girlish foolishness) imagine I can taste her skin there. I think of fruits I have not tasted, climes I have not basked in. Fires I would like to know. I lift my hand to the door and brush my fingers back and forth against the paneling. How light, how faint is the sound it makes. It is a sentimental gesture, yes – but after all, I am no empty machine. I spend a moment wondering whether she can hear it. Then I spin briskly on my heel and go down to my dear Mr. Rochester.


End file.
